Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

The MADness of the Resurgent U.S. Cold War with Russia

By Nicolas J. S. Davies | Global Research | March 28, 2022

The war in Ukraine has placed U.S. and NATO policy toward Russia under a spotlight, highlighting how the United States and its allies have expanded NATO right up to Russia’s borders, backed a coup and now a proxy war in Ukraine, imposed waves of economic sanctions, and launched a debilitating trillion-dollar arms race. The explicit goal is to pressure, weaken and ultimately eliminate Russia, or a Russia-China partnership, as a strategic competitor to U.S. imperial power.

The United States and NATO have used similar forms of force and coercion against many countries. In every case they have been catastrophic for the people directly impacted, whether they achieved their political aims or not.

Wars and violent regime changes in Kosovo, Iraq, Haiti and Libya have left them mired in endless corruption, poverty and chaos. Failed proxy wars in Somalia, Syria and Yemen have spawned endless war and humanitarian disasters. U.S. sanctions against Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela have impoverished their people but failed to change their governments.

Meanwhile, U.S.-backed coups in Chile, Bolivia and Honduras have sooner or later been reversed by grassroots movements to restore democratic, socialist government. The Taliban are governing Afghanistan again after a 20-year war to expel a U.S. and NATO army of occupation, for which the sore losers are now starving millions of Afghans.

But the risks and consequences of the U.S. Cold War on Russia are of a different order. The purpose of any war is to defeat your enemy. But how can you defeat an enemy that is explicitly committed to respond to the prospect of existential defeat by destroying the whole world?

This is in fact part of the military doctrine of the United States and Russia, who together possess over 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons. If either of them faces existential defeat, they are prepared to destroy human civilization in a nuclear holocaust that will kill Americans, Russians and neutrals alike.

In June 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree stating,

“The Russian Federation reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to the use of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction against it and/or its allies… and also in the case of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons, when the very existence of the state is put under threat.”

U.S. nuclear weapons policy is no more reassuring. A decades-long campaign for a U.S. “no first use” nuclear weapons policy still falls on deaf ears in Washington.

The 2018 U.S. Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) promised that the United States would not use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state. But in a war with another nuclear-armed country, it said, “The United States would only consider the use of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners.”

The 2018 NPR broadened the definition of “extreme circumstances” to cover “significant non-nuclear attacks,” which it said would “include, but are not limited to, attacks on the U.S., allies or partner civilian population or infrastructure, and attacks on U.S. or allied nuclear forces, their command and control, or warning and attack assessment.” The critical phrase, “but are not limited to,” removes any restriction at all on a U.S. nuclear first strike.

So, as the U.S. Cold War against Russia and China heats up, the only signal that the deliberately foggy threshold for the U.S. use of nuclear weapons has been crossed could be the first mushroom clouds exploding over Russia or China.

For our part in the West, Russia has explicitly warned us that it will use nuclear weapons if it believes the United States or NATO are threatening the existence of the Russian state. That is a threshold that the United States and NATO are already flirting with as they look for ways to increase their pressure on Russia over the war in Ukraine.

To make matters worse, the twelve-to-one imbalance between U.S. and Russian military spending has the effect, whether either side intends it or not, of increasing Russia’s reliance on the role of its nuclear arsenal when the chips are down in a crisis like this.

NATO countries, led by the United States and United Kingdom, are already supplying Ukraine with up to 17 plane-loads of weapons per day, training Ukrainian forces to use them and providing valuable and deadly satellite intelligence to Ukrainian military commanders. Hawkish voices in NATO countries are pushing hard for a no-fly zone or some other way to escalate the war and take advantage of Russia’s perceived weaknesses.

The danger that hawks in the State Department and Congress may convince President Biden to escalate the U.S. role in the war prompted the Pentagon to leak details of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) assessments of Russia’s conduct of the war to Newsweek’s William Arkin.

Senior DIA officers told Arkin that Russia has dropped fewer bombs and missiles on Ukraine in a month than U.S. forces dropped on Iraq in the first day of bombing in 2003, and that they see no evidence of Russia directly targeting civilians. Like U.S. “precision” weapons, Russian weapons are probably only about 80% accurate, so hundreds of stray bombs and missiles are killing and wounding civilians and hitting civilian infrastructure, as they do just as horrifically in every U.S. war.

The DIA analysts believe Russia is holding back from a more devastating war because what it really wants is not to destroy Ukrainian cities but to negotiate a diplomatic agreement to ensure a neutral, non-aligned Ukraine.

But the Pentagon appears to be so worried by the impact of highly effective Western and Ukrainian war propaganda that it has released secret intelligence to Newsweek to try to restore a measure of reality to the media’s portrayal of the war, before political pressure for NATO escalation leads to a nuclear war.

Since the United States and the U.S.S.R. blundered into their nuclear suicide pact in the 1950s, it has come to be known as Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD. As the Cold War evolved, they cooperated to reduce the risk of mutual assured destruction through arms control treaties, a hotline between Moscow and Washington, and regular contacts between U.S. and Soviet officials.

But the United States has now withdrawn from many of those arms control treaties and safeguard mechanisms. The risk of nuclear war is as great today as it has ever been, as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warns year after year in its annual Doomsday Clock statement. The Bulletin has also published detailed analyses of how specific technological advances in U.S. nuclear weapons design and strategy are increasing the risk of nuclear war.

The world understandably breathed a collective sigh of relief when the Cold War appeared to end in the early 1990s. But within a decade, the peace dividend the world hoped for was trumped by a power dividend. U.S. officials did not use their unipolar moment to build a more peaceful world, but to capitalize on the lack of a military peer competitor to launch an era of U.S. and NATO military expansion and serial aggression against militarily weaker countries and their people.

As Michael Mandelbaum, the director of East-West Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, crowed in 1990, “For the first time in 40 years, we can conduct military operations in the Middle East without worrying about triggering World War III.” Thirty years later, people in that part of the world may be forgiven for thinking that the United States and its allies have in fact unleashed World War III, against them, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Pakistan, Gaza, Libya, Syria, Yemen and across West Africa.

Russian President Boris Yeltsin complained bitterly to President Clinton over plans for NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, but Russia was powerless to prevent it. Russia had already been invaded by an army of neoliberal Western economic advisers, whose “shock therapy” shrank its GDP by 65%, reduced male life expectancy from 65 to 58, and empowered a new class of oligarchs to loot its national resources and state-owned enterprises.

President Putin restored the power of the Russian state and improved the Russian people’s living standards, but he did not at first push back against U.S. and NATO military expansion and war-making. However, when NATO and its Arab monarchist allies overthrew the Gaddafi government in Libya and then launched an even bloodier proxy war against Russia’s ally Syria, Russia intervened militarily to prevent the overthrow of the Syrian government.

Russia worked with the United States to remove and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles, and helped to open negotiations with Iran that eventually led to the JCPOA nuclear agreement. But the U.S. role in the coup in Ukraine in 2014, Russia’s subsequent reintegration of Crimea and its support for anti-coup separatists in Donbass put paid to further cooperation between Obama and Putin, plunging U.S.-Russian relations into a downward spiral that has now led us to the brink of nuclear war.

It is the epitome of official insanity that U.S., NATO and Russian leaders have resurrected this Cold War, which the whole world celebrated the end of, allowing plans for mass suicide and human extinction to once again masquerade as responsible defense policy.

While Russia bears full responsibility for invading Ukraine and for all the death and destruction of this war, this crisis did not come out of nowhere. The United States and its allies must reexamine their own roles in resurrecting the Cold War that spawned this crisis, if we are ever to return to a safer world for people everywhere.

Tragically, instead of expiring on its sell-by date in the 1990s along with the Warsaw Pact, NATO has transformed itself into an aggressive global military alliance, a fig-leaf for U.S. imperialism, and a forum for dangerous, self-fulfilling threat analysis, to justify its continued existence, endless expansion and crimes of aggression on three continents, in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Libya.

If this insanity indeed drives us to mass extinction, it will be no consolation to the scattered and dying survivors that their leaders succeeded in destroying their enemies’ country too. They will simply curse leaders on all sides for their blindness and stupidity. The propaganda by which each side demonized the other will be only a cruel irony once its end result is seen to be the destruction of everything leaders on all sides claimed to be defending.

This reality is common to all sides in this resurgent Cold War. But, like the voices of peace activists in Russia today, our voices are more powerful when we hold our own leaders accountable and work to change our own country’s behavior.

If Americans just echo U.S. propaganda, deny our own country’s role in provoking this crisis and turn all our ire towards President Putin and Russia, it will only serve to fuel the escalating tensions and bring on the next phase of this conflict, whatever dangerous new form that may take.

But if we campaign to change our country’s policies, de-escalate conflicts and find common ground with our neighbors in Ukraine, Russia, China and the rest of the world, we can cooperate and solve our serious common challenges together.

A top priority must be to dismantle the nuclear Doomsday machine we have inadvertently collaborated to build and maintain for 70 years, along with the obsolete and dangerous NATO military alliance. We cannot let the “unwarranted influence” and “misplaced power” of the Military-Industrial Complex keep leading us into ever more dangerous military crises until one of them spins out of control and destroys us all.

March 29, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

WHAT IS KILLING MILLENNIALS?

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | March 24, 2022

Last year there was a sudden spike in deaths among 25 to 44 year olds. Biologist & data analyst, Dr. Jessica Rose joins The HighWire to discuss her latest investigation into this phenomena, and the overwhelming evidence she has uncovered on the possible culprit.

March 29, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

The Specter of Asymptomatic Spread

By Aaron Kheriaty | The Brownstone Institute | March 28, 2022

In January 2020, at the very start of the pandemic, the New England Journal of Medicine published a letter that suggesting the possibility that covid could be spread by people who did not show any symptoms of the illness. This article was based on a single case report.

Germany’s public health agency, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), later spoke with the person mentioned in the case report, who was supposedly the asymptomatic spreader, and she clarified that she did have symptoms encountering the second person mentioned in the article. So, this case report, published in one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, was a false alarm. But no matter, the myth of asymptomatic spread was born.

On June 8, 2020, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that asymptomatic people could transmit covid. That same day, Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical lead for the covid pandemic, clarified that people who have covid without any symptoms “very rarely” transmit the disease to others.

WHO then backtracked on their original alarmist statement one day later. Weeks later, Kerkhove was pressured by the public health establishment, including Harvard’s Global Health Institute, to backtrack on her statement that asymptomatic spread was very rare, claiming that the jury was still out.

Her original claim that asymptomatic spread was not a driver of the pandemic was correct, as is now clear. Given that no respiratory virus in history was known to spread asymptomatically, this should not have surprised anyone.

But the damage was already done. The media ran with the asymptomatic threat story. The specter of people with no symptoms being potentially dangerous—which never had any scientific basis—turned every fellow citizen into a possible threat to one’s existence.

We should notice the complete reversal that this effected in our thinking about health and illness. In the past, a person was assumed to be healthy until proven sick. If one missed work for a prolonged period, one needed a note from a doctor establishing an illness. During covid, the criteria was reversed: we began to assume that people were sick until proven healthy. One needed a negative covid test to return to work.

It would be hard to devise a better method than the widespread myth of asymptomatic spread combined with quarantining the healthy to destroy the fabric of society and to divide us. People who are afraid of everyone, who are locked down, who are isolated for months behind screens, are easier to control.

A society grounded on “social distancing” is a contradiction—it’s a kind of anti-society. Consider what happened to us, consider the human goods we sacrificed to preserve bare life at all costs: friendships, holidays with family, work, visiting the sick and dying, worshipping God, burying the dead.

Aaron Kheriaty, former Professor of Psychiatry at the UCI School of Medicine and Director, Medical Ethics at UCI Health, is a Senior Scholar of the Brownstone Institute.

March 28, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Climate History Began Eight Years Ago

Tony Heller | March 26, 2022

Climate alarm is based on ambulance chasing commonplace events, making up fake statistics about them, and never permitting an honest scientist to weigh in on the discussion.

March 28, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Why sleeping pills are a bad idea

By Sebastian Rushworth, M.D. | March 24, 2022

I hate sleeping pills. I really hate them. The negative emotional response I get when I see them in a patient’s chart is much stronger than what I feel when I see pretty much any other drug. In particular, there is one class of sleeping pill that I really hate, and that is the weirdly named “nonbenzodiazepine”, which is basically a benzodiazepine (a highly addictive sedative drug) but which as been marketed instead as a sleeping pill. Common examples of nonbenzodiazepines are Imovane and Ambien.

Why do I hate them so much?

Well, because they’re used so irresponsibly by both doctors and patients. The big problem with these drugs is that they are absurdly addictive, and that tolerance develops after just days of use. So, while Imovane or Ambien may help you fall asleep a little bit faster, and sleep a little bit longer initially (the effect is actually quite marginal, less than half an hour), that beneficial effect is completely gone after just a few days or weeks of use.

What that means is that the amount of sleep you are getting is equivalent, after just a few weeks, to what it would have been if you’d never taken the drug in the first place. On top of that, you’ve now developed an addiction – if you don’t take the drug, your sleep will be much worse than it would have been if you’d never taken the drug in the first place. And once an addiction to a nonbenzodiazepine has developed, it is very hard to stop. Which is why so many people end up addicted to these drugs.

An elderly colleague once said to me that if you want to have a good life as a doctor, then you should refuse to ever prescribe addictive drugs to anyone, especially addictive sleeping pills. That way, the addicts will soon realize that they won’t get anywhere with you, and they’ll go elsewhere. Of course, that doesn’t remove the problem, it just shifts it on to someone else’s plate. But at least then you’re not contributing to the problem by producing new addicts.

Sleeping pills are basically band-aids. They do nothing to solve the underlying problem. If you have a sleeping problem and you take a sleeping pill, then even if the pill works, you still have a sleeping problem. Nothing has changed. What people need to realize is that there is no magic pill that can fix your problems for you. That is true for everything, not just sleep. A statin won’t fix your heart disease, a blood pressure lowering drug won’t fix your high blood pressure, and a glucose lowering drug won’t fix your diabetes. They’re all band-aids, and pretty ineffective band-aids at that. What you need to do, if you have a health issue, is to start taking responsibility for your own health.

There are antihistamine-based sleeping pills that aren’t addictive, it’s true, but they’re still just band-aids, and while they may help somewhat with sleep (the effect is pretty marginal, as it is for most other types of drugs), they interfere with sleep architecture and worsen cognitive performance, just like the addictive sleeping pills do.

If you have a sleeping problem, then first you need to ask yourself, what is causing it?

Is the problem alcohol? Well, then you need to cut down your alcohol consumption. Is the problem that you’re not physically active enough? Well, again, the solution is simple. Start moving more. Tire yourself out enough during the day that your body is ready to sleep at night. Is the problem anxiety about having to go to a job you hate in the morning? Change jobs!

And make sure you have good sleep hygiene. Avoid screens close to bed time. Sleep in a dark, cool room. Don’t get in bed until you’re truly tired enough to fall asleep, and if you can’t fall asleep naturally within 15 minutes, get up again and read a book until you are tired enough to sleep. Set an alarm and get up at the same time every day (even weekends).

If you have a sleeping problem and your doctor tries to prescribe you a sleeping pill, ask why they are prescribing it and if they think it’s really necessary. Most likely the reason is that they think you expect/want a prescription, and they don’t think it’s really necessary. Then ask if you can get a referral for sleep therapy instead. Unlike sleeping pills, sleep therapy really does work to improve sleep over the long term.

March 27, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

PILOT CALLS ON CANADIANS TO HAVE COURAGE

The Scoop – February 16, 2022

Greg Hill, a pilot with 32 years experience in both regular and military contexts, calls on Canadians to ‘have courage’. Greg Hill uses a well airline disaster as an example to drive home his point.

March 27, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Two years that trampled on freedoms earned over centuries

By James Rogers | TCW Defending Freedom | March 26, 2022

PATRICK Benham-Crosswell’s excellent article in TCW on Thursday stimulated a need to consolidate a few thoughts.

The concept of ‘man-made climate change’ has always been a complete falsehood. I used to think it was a simple scam that enabled governments to raise taxes and levies on prosperous Western societies; but it is now a much bigger, and more complicated, matter. Whether or not, back in 1992, with Al Gore’s book Earth in the Balance, our current situation was the planned destination, or whether or not other agendas have been piggy-backed on to environmentalism, we don’t know.

Two years ago we were presented with another ‘inconvenient truth’, that the government – indeed governments almost everywhere – were suspending our liberties ‘for a few weeks’. As March 2020 dragged into April and May, stuck in their homes, people began to do their own research. It became obvious to me that what was happening was not about a ‘deadly virus’, and I stated my belief was that vested interests were working to ensure that the temporary socialisation of our society and economy became permanent. Expressing this belief cost me many relationships.

In spring 2020, despite Johnson’s effective parliamentary coup to rule by decree, I did not believe that our government’s C-19 strategy represented those vested interests. By autumn though, I did. Dr Mike Yeadon and friends demolished the Corman-Drosten Paper on PCR tests. This dishonest paper asserted that PCR testing for C-19 was both valid and necessary, and we know that Hancock based his whole act and legal authority on there being legions of ‘infectious’ people around, all procured by PCR tests. Two of the signatories of the Corman-Drosten Paper, Maria Zambon (also a senior Sage member) and Joanna Ellis, are senior staff of Public Health England, so the British government knew full well that their strategy was based on scientific fraud.

At Christmas 2021 we learned that in spring 2020 our government certainly did not believe that C-19 was a deadly illness: they worked in offices together, celebrated birthdays and Fridays together, all in the face of the ‘worst viral pandemic since 1919’.

Nothing about C-19 has made any sense whatsoever. It was a purposely manufactured ‘crisis’ and entirely sustained by propaganda and massive government over-reach. For the past 25 years various viruses created problems that were dealt with quite quickly, and emergencies were normalised swiftly. Isn’t that one of the principal functions of government? To keep society calm, stable, well-managed and productive? So why was a cold virus, fatal only to 0.1 per cent of those who caught it, allowed to dominate our lives for two years? Two years in which the democratic values and legal freedoms that took centuries to generate have been well and truly stomped on, and the integrity of science trashed. Why have governments, health services and academics all around the world wilfully ignored the undeniable damage that the jabs have done? Why have they ignored the fact that the jabs never worked as advertised? Why have the media been complicit in this?

In WWII governments came down very hard on defeatism and fear-mongering. Anyone claiming the nation was doomed was arrested and faced a possible death penalty. With C-19, governments went out of the way to generate fear. With our own money, they bought the media, and created the illusion of a devastating ‘crisis’ needing radical solutions that only governments could provide.

Foolish people and lazy thinkers accepted this without question, especially as governments paid people not to work, and/or allowed them to ‘work from home’. What was for them not to like? In 2020 and 2021 a lot of people saved a lot of money – but they never questioned the true cost of submitting to regulation.

Governments abused their powers and trampled on freedoms, and in parallel, without too many people noticing, they proceeded to create digital systems that will enable them to keep the people subdued and manipulated for ever. In all probability, digital ID, health records and currency are nearly ready to be implemented; they are just waiting for the ‘right time’. What the signal will be and who will give it are interesting questions to ponder.

Governments’ responses to C-19 also created significant economic problems, all of which have been and will be disproportionately borne by small businesses and lower income households while making big business much, much richer. These economic issues have been compounded by what is happening in Ukraine. Nothing about this ‘crisis’ makes any sense either. It is clear that the West has been manipulating Ukrainian politics for over 20 years.

So, together with ‘pestilence’ and ‘war’, the other ‘crisis’ that has been rolling along for 25 years is ‘climate change’, or more accurately, the West’s source(s) of energy. Once again, there’s not much about the West’s renewable energy strategy that makes sense. That carbon dioxide is a ‘problem’ makes no rational sense. Power generation by means of nuclear technology [?], fracking and even creating energy from burning household waste makes perfect sense; yet all have been eschewed in favour of more expensive and damaging options, windmills and solar energy, the construction, maintenance and operation of which costs far more than the alternatives. They desecrate the environment and provide nowhere near as much energy as is required.

It is clear that we are all going to have to consume less energy than we do now. How this will be managed is another interesting question. It seems it will be possible only with coercion. Coercion? Impossible? Not at all – how easy was it for governments to ‘persuade’ people to get jabbed? How easy was it for them to get people to turn on their neighbour for not being jabbed? How easy was for them to make useless face masks a symbol of virtue and integrity? How easy has it been for governments to get people to believe that the Ukrainian government is a squeaky-clean ‘victim’?

When the power cuts come – and they will: why else has the government been pushing ‘smart meters’ for ten years? – watch out for the signs in windows that proudly claim, ‘Happy to sit in the cold and dark to save polar bears’ or ‘Don’t drive, save the world’ or ‘Proud to eat raw food so we don’t have to buy Russian gas’.

It’s been so easy for them to make new truths, which in turn must create deniers, who are unequivocal demons.

Ever wondered why we are being continually told that ‘racism’ is a huge stain on the world, and that footballers must kneel before every game? Why are we constantly being made to feel bad about being white? Why were Britons not allowed to continue the good progress in race relations that commenced in the mid-1980s, and saw Britain morph into a nation that was very comfortable with itself in the 1990s? Why has racism become a ‘devastating problem’, when we all know that our society is tolerant and benevolent?

Because governments use ‘racism’ as a method of dividing and conquering. Similarly, all the tripe about LBGTQ. It easy for governments to accomplish their prime task of economic devastation and the socialisation and total control over society, if people are too busy arguing about ‘micro-aggressions’, not feeling ’safe’, the ‘right to choose gender’ and why there aren’t enough black people playing cricket for England.

Those who ‘went green’ are the same people who insist that Britain is a ‘racist country’, the same people who voted ‘remain’ and demanded the result of a democratic referendum be overturned, the same people who hated Trump, declared that he would bring about disaster and were happy when a senile man became leader of the free world. They are the same people who wear masks and demand that you get jabbed, the same people who demanded lockdown regulation and cheered the £400billion spent on it all, the same people who are holding fundraisers for Ukraine. They are the same people who believe in the ‘toxic privilege of white males’ and the same people who believe that gender is not a matter determined by nature and science.

These are people who believe in the ‘greater good’; they are no doubt genuinely nice people, but they are wrong about almost everything. They have believed everything that the BBC and Guardian have told them for 25 years. Has anyone else noticed how every vox pop and interview with a sports star involves questions about ‘emotions’? Emotion is now the sole currency of television, it has become far, far more important than reason. Emotions can be manipulated, and so can people – think about all of those who spent Thursday evenings banging pots for the NHS (which had shut down). These people ceased to do their own reading and research, they stopped thinking critically and rationally, they feel guilty about being comfortably off and they have no qualms at all about sacrificing individual freedom and democracy if doing so justifies their beliefs and helps ’their side’ win.

The very fact that society – even the Royal Society – can entertain unscientific, and totally uneconomic, ideas about the climate, about viruses and the basic biology of gender, tells us everything about the situation we are in. Governments are manipulating everything, and a huge section of society has swallowed, or is too polite or afraid of being controversial, to stand against it.

In the not-too-distant future, it is highly likely that the ‘crises’ of pestilence, war and energy will create economic devastation. I guess that this will be the point where they impose their systems of control and universal basic income, and if you want your ‘income’, you’d better get a jab – yes, it will kill you at age 70, but it’s for the greater good. Our society will be socialised permanently, our lives will change for ever, and this will be cheered to the rafters by people whose mindset has been trained to ‘care’ about things other than their basic freedoms.

March 26, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

How Dare the Government Think it is Entitled to Trample on Our Fundamental Freedoms to Keep Us ‘Safe’

By David Seedhouse | The Daily Sceptic | March 25, 2022

One of the most troubling aspects of the Government’s response to the pandemic was its complete disregard for ethics. It seems not to have occurred to the decision-makers that the instant removal of fundamental civil liberties required – and must always require – the most comprehensive ethical justification.

During the largely self-made crisis, the Government passed sweeping mandates with barely any serious reflection on the impacts on millions of people’s lives, and stubbornly refused to listen to a multitude of far more thoughtful, well-informed alternatives.

Inexcusably, it appears that the main reason the Government and its advisors neglected to consider ethics was brute ignorance – they didn’t think about ethics because they have no idea why it is important. To them ethics is at best a scarcely relevant adjunct to ‘following the science’.

Had they understood ethics – or bothered to ask people who do – they would have been able to approach policymaking in a properly balanced and effective manner.

There are several ways to include ethics in decision-making. Two of these are 1) to apply ethical standards and principles and 2) to deliberate holistically. Both can be undertaken simultaneously.

Ethical standards

A range of carefully considered ethical standards has been developed and fought for in the Western world over the past 70 years and more. Arguably the most fundamental of these is the principle of informed consent to interventions, established in both ethical theory and health care law. It is now regarded as essential that any health care professional – including public health professionals – must fully explain the range of possible interventions available and disclose the reasoning behind any recommendation they make. Anything less is either negligent or coercive.

Holistic deliberation 

Beyond the application of fundamental principles, ethics may be seen as a thoughtful, wide-ranging decision-making approach which seeks to balance a variety of factors to reach reasonable conclusions. These conclusions will aways include both evidence and values. Taking one without the other is bound to lead to inadequate choices: the evidence cannot speak for itself and value judgements alone quickly become dogma.

The Government and its advisors failed woefully to take account of either understanding of ethics.

Any robust analysis of a personal or social problem requires the consideration of a range of ideas. However it seems that where public health is concerned, policies are routinely drawn up according to a single imperative – ‘we must reduce disease and therefore save lives’ – but of course this imperative itself requires ethical standards and ethical deliberation because, as we have tragically witnessed, trying to save lives in one way risks lives in other ways.

As soon as you start to think beyond the fear of infection to consider the bigger picture, there is a flood of specific ethical issues.

  • Is it ethical to force businesses to close their doors?
  • Is it ethical to cause so many people to lose their livelihoods?
  • How is it acceptable to override basic human rights with so little public involvement?
  • Is it ethical to close schools, particularly when the evidence that this will help control the spread of the virus is unclear? (In 2022 it is now clear that this made little or no difference to ‘stopping the spread’.)
  • Do restrictions heighten social inequalities (it is easier to self-isolate in a comfortable home, it is easier to cope if you have a pleasant garden, it is easier to weather financial uncertainty if you have a secure career and savings)?
  • Given that governments have borrowed many billions to weather the crisis, and this debt will have to be repaid, is it ethical to cause hardship and suffering to future generations in the interest of existing generations?

There are many other measurable harms that should have been considered. ‘Minimising death’ was only one of many possible rationales. Consequently, the Government’s stubborn failure to reflect in a professional, balanced way caused massive, avoidable damage.

Ethics is ultimately a matter of respecting thoughtful traditions grounded in compassion and human rights, and thinking as deeply as possible about the many effects your choices will have on other people. Ethics is the essence of civilised human co-existence. Over the past two years a handful of people, quite out of their depth, were able to dismiss ethics – along with previous well-documented Government pandemic planning – with what seemed like a mere wave of the hand.

We must ensure that this can never happen again.

Dr. David Seedhouse is an Honorary Professor of Deliberative Practice at Aston University.

March 26, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Two Weeks To Flatten The World

By Michael Bryant | OffGuardian | March 25, 2022

All this is a digression. The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men. How does one man assert his power over another? … By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?
George Orwell, “1984”

“We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else, whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld, or CNN.“
B.W. Powe

COVID-19 has magically disappeared.

After more than two years of non-stop bombardment with Covid “news”, there has been none at all in mainstream headlines for over a week. The media giveth and the media taketh away.

Through the immaculate erasure of the ‘Covid Crisis,’ those responsible for these harms are attempting to make us forget what they did to us, our families, and the permanent damage they caused to society.

Think back to what life was like two years ago and imagine if someone told you that a “health emergency” would require a crackdown on all social and economic life.

Remarkably, the public health orders moved quickly from “flattening the curve” and “slowing the spread” to containment, suppression, contact tracing, social isolation, quarantine, face coverings, de facto house arrest aka “lockdowns” (a prison/slave camp term), and mandated experimental injections.

In order to “keep us safe” government policies mushroomed from innocuous instructions into draconian decrees.

The limitation of the right to engage in basic economic transactions; the limitation of the right to freedom of movement; limitations on the right to practice religion; the suspension of the right to an education; the denial of the right to a livelihood; the removal of the right to receive or refuse medical attention; suspension of public meetings; suspension of juries; suppression of the right to freedom of expression; denial of the right to assembly; and much else became the new operating principles of “The Covid World.”

The institution of a bio-security police state was birthed according to health authorities and others the power to quarantine someone considered “infected” or simply to have been in contact with a purported “case.”

To make this appear necessary and acceptable, an intensive full-spectrum psychological assault on our sensibilities was implemented. Covid-19 was hyped as the ‘New Black Death’.

We were told by ‘important-looking people’ that millions will die, the entire planet is in danger, a global response is required and everyone must get in line with the program whilst “heroes” and “experts” take charge of this new global war to keep us safe.

Illogical catchphrases designed to hypnotize the public into a malleable mental state were repeated over and over in every media outlet, across virtually every social institution, and plastered throughout all walks of the public sphere.

“Flatten the Curve”, “The New Normal”, “Social Distancing” and “Follow the Science“ became the nation’s Covid shibboleths. Media bullhorns relentlessly blasted the doublespeak into the public psyche. Oxymorons and euphemisms dominated the contours of any and all “Covid-related” discourse.

Such linguistic manipulations were readily absorbed and seamlessly adopted by much of the public and became the Doublethink phraseology of the Covid Era.

Mantras of the Covid Era were followed by a fleet of psychologically disorienting and arbitrary ‘regulations’, ‘advice‘, and ‘guidelines’ which were quickly put in place, selectively enforced and subsequently changed.

No one was spared.

Children came under sustained psychological attacks, branded ‘super spreaders’, and were told to keep away from the grandparents lest they “kill granny.”

Operating in a fog of psychological trauma, everyone moved through a world devoid of smiles and laughter where faces were hidden by masks and smothered in cloth.

This barrage of brutalizing manipulations was designed to condition us to accept the tyrannical impositions of “The New Normal.” The emotional toll, because of COVID fear-mongering and media hysteria, caused the citizenry to become mentally tamed like institutionalized prisoners who would come begging for “a way out.”

The preordained and only “allowed” exit from this viral nightmare demanded that society embrace the magical “cure” of the “miracle” inoculation. A medical miracle promised to be so effective that it would be required year after year after year.

When not embraced it would be enforced.

One of the striking characteristics of the media blitzkrieg surrounding the Covid “pandemic” – or, to be more precise, the reporting of the “pandemic” – is how it so easily resembled the “War on Terror” or indeed, any war, when considered purely in terms of its effect.

Mask wearing became a patriotic duty. “Security theater” became a feature of everyday life. The vast carnage of Covid policies was sloughed off as “collateral damage.”

Lost in the sound and fury of this media bombardment were evidence, observation, and measurement– 3 of the key pillars of science.

These were replaced by make-believe forecasts, computer-generated estimates, or other not to be questioned ‘scientific metrics’ that hospitals would be over-run, mortuaries would spill into the streets and crematoriums would run out of fuel disposing of all the bodies.

Even as direct observation and real scientific data showed none of this to be true, the public health apparatus and media juggernaut ensured the public would not be exposed to such heresy.

A digital curtain of mass McCarthyite-like censorship descended upon this “Brave New World” of fact-free hysteria.

No amount of evidence could slow the propaganda machine which remained in high gear spitting out a non-stop stream of sanctimonious slogans and exaggerated death tallies.

The intended effect was widespread panic, resulting in a collective psychosis that negated all thought.

“We don’t have time!”

“We must act now!”

“Listen to the “experts!”

“Follow the science!”

“We don’t have the “luxury” of critical thinking!”

And most importantly:

“All who question the “official” narrative must be condemned.”

Put simply, Covid-19 was not an epidemiological event, it was a psychological operation.

Two years later, as bureaucrats and politicians wind down the Covid restrictions in order to quell growing unrest, we can be assured they will insist on retaining the “right” to re-impose them at will.

As long as “new variants lurk right around the corner”, public health bureaucrats and pandemic profiteers can invent the next “health emergency” to impose more shutdowns for any “viral event” that conveniently suits their political and financial aims.

While the Covid propaganda has vanished it is imperative we keep the mountain of lies under scrutiny and continue unveiling the massive corruption that defines the “Covid Era.” This is the only path towards justice and is necessary to defend against future episodes of “pandemic” hysteria.

Ultimately there can be no comprehensive debate and complete understanding of the devastating consequences of the ‘Covid Crisis’ policies without a historical and up-to-date analysis of the Medical Industry’s role in pushing socioeconomic and political agendas which benefit the ruling elites.

It is vital to understand that the public health industry is now directly tied to global markets and operates based on the demands of those financial conglomerates. Manufactured pandemics are now mammoth investment opportunities that increase the wealth of billionaires and further consolidate their power.

It is also necessary to recognize that the primary purpose of the medical industry is no longer the “art of healing”, rather as a financial instrument benefiting investors.

‘We the people‘ must also recognize that the Medical Industry has now been fully weaponized as a punitive system designed to process, dehumanize and control every single person in the system. Before our very eyes, we have seen up close how mere biological existence is criminalized by that system.

The magic act of Covid vanishing from media view and public perception is not due to any medical miracle or the natural trajectory of a virus losing its potency. It was performed by those who manufactured this reality and committed countless crimes, coordinated in an attempt to slip out the back door, avoid further public inquiry and escape any legal consequences.

Though the story of the virus is nearly over, the sorcery that created it has not been exorcised.

The urgent message that we must take from these past two years is that we are under sustained psychological warfare and have been for quite some time.

We won’t have truly won until it is universally established that Medical Freedom is not a negotiable commodity controlled by state bureaucrats, political opportunists, or the medical cartel.

Nothing has been won until the ideology that the state controls our bodily autonomy has been thoroughly repudiated.

This story is not finished until the individuals and institutions that deceived the public and censored and persecuted dissenting voices over the past two years are publicly held accountable.

This fight is not over.

Michael Bryant is a freelance journalist/activist and researcher who presently focuses primarily on issues surrounding health freedom. His work has appeared on HealthFreedomDefense.org

March 26, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

“They did it on purpose, but the Europeans don’t know – they were poisoned, too”

TANJUG | MARCH 24, 2022

During the bombing of FR Yugoslavia, NATO also poisoned Europe, Dr Danica Grujičić told the Russian news agency RIA Novosti.

The director of the Institute of Oncology and Radiology of Serbia explained that chemical plants and various dangerous industries were bombed, which, as she says, created an ecological catastrophe and poisoned Europe.

According to Grujičić, the use of NATO bombs with depleted uranium and the destruction of environmentally dangerous facilities during air strikes have led to Serbia being now the leader in the number of cancer deaths in Europe, with almost 60.000 new cancer patients a year.

“The North Atlantic Alliance did not pay attention to civilian casualties. Everyone knows the famous conversation between former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and Finnish diplomat Martti Ahtisaari, who said that Belgrade would be levelled to the ground (if it does not accept the ultimatum),” Grujičić added.

“If we had a nuclear power plant, they would definitely hit it, because they attacked everything on the list of facilities dangerous for the environment. They knew that a local environmental catastrophe would be created in every oil refinery, chemical company. They did it on purpose”, she said.

Grujičić recalled that about 15 tons of depleted uranium were officially dumped on Serbia, but emphasized that “no one knows how much it really was, and it will never be known.”

“We have taken the initiative to determine with mathematical precision, not only medical, but also environmental consequences. The data we received show that the whole of Europe was polluted. Europeans who were looking forward to the bombs over Belgrade and Serbia are also endangered and do not know what they were breathing, eating, drinking,” she added.

March 26, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Dissecting the Ukraine imbroglio

By Former Ambassador MK Bhadrakumar | The Tribune | March 21, 2022

A successful war is invariably a popular one. The paradox is, to be a success, the war has to be popular, but not necessarily vice versa. This is where American policymakers, especially in the state department, and a big chunk of political elite, find themselves carousing in some fantasyland pinning hopes on a colour revolution in Russia due to the leadership’s decision to go to war in Ukraine. It must have come as a surprise and huge disappointment to them that according to even independent (rather, unfriendly) polls conducted in Poland, President Vladimir Putin’s rating has only soared to over 70 per cent during these past three weeks.

The unusual form of Russian action is because of its focus on restoring security of Donbass region and its boundaries.

For Putin himself, it is nonetheless a double challenge, as the statesman in him is defending Russia’s national security from the predatory mindset of the US and NATO while the politician in him is not only sensing and responding to the expectations of the people regarding the war but getting them to adjust to a painful (but historic) economic transition in the country due to its decoupling from the western economies. That involves switching attention from one planet to another on a sustainable 24X7 basis.

These nuances also explain the anatomy of Russia’s war in Ukraine — its ponderous progress, interspersed with lulls like a slowcoach of a provincial passenger train from time immemorial. In reality, though, in about half the time that the Pentagon took to seize control of Iraq during the 2003 invasion (with all the advantages that it was fighting an emaciated enemy degraded through a decade), Russia’s special operation appears to have more or less achieved its core military objective, which is to secure the Donbass region that has a big Russian population with extensive family kinships within Russia — an emotive issue, no doubt, given the genocide that followed the CIA-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014.

New kids on the block wouldn’t know that unspeakable atrocities were perpetrated by extreme nationalist and fascist groups against the Russian population through the past 8-year period. Over 14,000 civilians were killed, albeit in the American eyes, that didn’t qualify as “war crimes” because those fascist, neo-Nazi groups were largely mentored by them. Most of the 3.6 million people living in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions who survived the genocide speak Russian and one-fifth of them are Russian citizens. Arguably, the security of Donbass region and the restoration of its original administrative boundaries (as of 2014 before Ukrainian forces attacked pro-Russian separatists) is a salience of the Russian operation. That explains why the operation took an unusual form with the Russian forces avoiding fighting as far as possible and instead surrounding the Ukrainian forces and encouraging them to surrender. An estimated 60,000 Ukrainian troops are under siege and the effort is to make them surrender rather than take the easy route to vanquish them.

This has been the pattern of the Russian operation elsewhere too, which confused most Western analysts who expected sound and fury like General MacArthur’s in Japan — amphibious landings, frontal assaults on towns and cities and outright occupation. If we look at the map from northern Belarus border, clockwise, major cities — Chernihiv, Sumy and Kharkiv — have been surrounded. While Russian columns from Chernihiv and Sumy advanced toward the outskirts of Kyiv, those from east of Kharkiv moved south to link up with the forces in Luhansk and are currently engaged in taking control of the strategic Izium-Severodonetsk axis, which would establish Russian control of entire eastern region and virtually secure the Donbass region — that is, except for Mariupol port city on the Sea of Azov (which was originally part of Donetsk).

Mariupol will give the two independent Donbass republics a major port head that would provide them access to the world market, which is hugely significant for future development of that entire resource-rich region, straddling Ukraine’s rust belt. Mariupol is not only a centre for grain trade, metallurgy and heavy engineering but also higher education and business. Sensing Mariupol’s centrality to Russian strategy, the neo-Nazi Azov Brigade has been deployed to the port city. That explains the residual resistance.

The other focal point of the Russian operation currently is Kyiv, which is now surrounded on the west, north and east. On the face of it, Russian forces are not planning to launch a frontal assault on the capital city but that option remains. Again, Odessa, jewel in the crown of Black Sea and the legacy of Catherine the Great to Mother Russia, could be in Russian sights.

Clearly, the operation is limited to the eastern side of Dnieper river. The tactic is to target convoys of western arms with missile strikes. Lviv in western Ukraine witnessed an attack on Friday. Two days earlier, a large base 20 km from the Polish border and a major depot for weapons and training ground for mercenaries were also targeted. But the operations are not targeting Ukrainian cities and Moscow has no intentions of occupying the country, but is concentrating on limited surgical strikes to incapacitate Ukrainian military infrastructure.

Moscow seeks a peace agreement. But the catch is, the incumbent leadership of Volodymyr Zelenskyy is highly unstable and the ex-comedian himself is manipulated by folks in Washington who are wedded to the notion that the longer the conflict lasts, the more Russia ‘bleeds’. The global information field, which is traditionally dominated by American and British media — and the Anglo-Saxon countries in general — is creating self-serving narratives. Even in America, only Fox News presents some alternative point of view. To borrow from the Prussian General and strategist Clausewitz, the Ukraine war is veritably ‘a continuation of policy with other means’.

March 26, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

PFIZER CEO SETTING HEALTH POLICY?

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | March 24, 2022

In Fauci’s absence as Covid’s public health media mouthpiece, an ironic twist of transparency has chosen a puzzling replacement – Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.

SHOCKING NEW COVID VACCINE SIDE EFFECTS

Welcome to the next generation of possible vaccine harms. From mouth blisters to debilitating nervous system disorders, scientists are reporting troubling side effects from COVID-19 vaccines.

BON VOYAGE, MACRON?!

All eyes are on the coming French elections as the world watches the first political choice to vote out those who forced lockdowns, mandates and purposely made life miserable for much of their population. Opposing French PM Macron who’s trying for his 2nd term is Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour, both siding with the unemployed healthcare workers’ plight due to vaccine refusal.

March 26, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »